This document relates to generation and control of laser pulses, including optical pulse amplifiers and pulse lasers.
Ultra short pulsed (USP) lasers with a pulse length less than 1-10 picoseconds are attractive for a wide range of applications such as material processing, optical sensing, optical ablation, precision surgery including ophthalmology, biomedical, nonlinear studies and spectroscopy. In some of these and other applications, the laser pulses may be required to have sufficient pulse energy.
High energy laser pulses can be generated by amplifying laser pulses generated by a seed laser. Various optical amplifiers are designed to amplify light by providing an optical gain at the same wavelength of the light to be amplified so that the light, after transmitting through an optical gain medium of the optical amplifier, is amplified in its power or energy and the amplified light is at the same wavelength of the original light prior to the amplification. The optical gain of the optical amplifier can be obtained by pump light that optically excites the optical gain medium such as a Nd or Yb doped fiber amplifier, or by an electrically energized gain medium such as a semiconductor optical amplifier based on quantum wells and other gain mechanisms.